Ok, I'm a car nut. I've been hot-rodding around racetracks and autocrosses for as long as I can remember. Searching for extremes in the automobile sport leads to some interesting places, to be sure. So does searching for extremes in the computing world. So, what's your dream interface style? Is it a world of domain-specific languages, emacs, parser combinators, and ASCII (ok, ok, XML even) as the ultimate interchange meta*standard? Or is it a world of boxes, arrows, vertex shaders, and click-and-drag as the ultimate interchange standard? If you're not sure about the computing answer, you might try the following little quiz from the automobile world. I promise you, this is not a trick question ... there's no right answer. It's a matter of taste. Ok, here goes. Which of the following, two sports cars is "better":
#1 http://www.rsportscars.com/eng/cars/ferrari_enzo.asp
#2 http://www.rsportscars.com/eng/cars/caterham_csr.asp
If you can't answer "better", perhaps you can see the analogy to user interfaces? A sports car is all about user interface, especially if you're punting one around a race track, keeping the thing at the limit of adhesion as much as possible, consistently with Newton. These two cars represent polar opposites, in my mind, anyway, of the sports-car spectrum in just the way as radically text-based interface technology and radically graphics-based technology represent polar opposites in the user-interface spectrum.